Intersectional Justice: Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi's Post on White Voters and Disability

One of the hallmarks of this blog, at least as I envisioned, is to be unfailingly critical even when that's uncomfortable. I'm willing to point to problems and disability representation in works of journalism, literature, and art, even from people whose work I admire. I try to be equally critical of my own conduct, and listen when I make mistakes – as I invariably do. That is the only way for our movement to get stronger.

I am writing this post because Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and CEO of RespectAbility, a disability rights and advocacy organization - and someone who was first a source and then an employer of mine - posted a racially biased statement on her private Facebook today. The post was set to public and I was alerted to it by a number of people.

Here are the screenshots.

The post shows a picture of George H. W. Bush and links to a news story of him saying he will vote for Clinton. Mizrahi wrote:

If Hillary wins it will because of white voters who care about people with disabilities. BTW, this is NOT a partisan thing. The same is true of Republican Sen. Richard Burr in NC who is running as the pro-PwDs candidate there.. THE POWER OF VOTERS WITH DISABILITIES WILL DETERMINE THE OUTCOME OF THE 2016 ELECTION! Remember that George H.W. Bush signed the ADA!

In the thread, when reminded that "black voters care about people with disabilities as well," Mizrahi wrote:

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi Of course but they were already voting for Hillary for other reasons.

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi In politics there are wedge issues. for communities of color there is a long list of reasons voters will overwhelmingly vote for Hillary. For white voters, polls show that they are leaning for Trump. So what would make sub groups of them do something different than Trump? Bloomberg poll has disability as the top reason. So it's a real difference.

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The post is now down. Lauren Appelbaum, communications director of RespectAbility, posted that the comments of any individual do not represent the organization, but that she is more than willing to discuss the views of RespectAbility.

Last May, I worked for RespectAbility in helping to edit a memo that Mizrahi wrote to the White House into a publishable form. I worked for a few days making the early draft, then took a more passive role from the project and changed my byline to "edited by," as the document evolved. Before that, I interviewed Mizrahi as a source last Fall, wrote about the RespectAbility Fellows in January, and was sent by RespectAbility to write and learn about disability at the New Hampshire primary. I believe that their work during the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries was outstanding, including their candidate questionnaires which pushed people to go on the record on disability issues. I stand by my assessment that the organization is filled with people working tirelessly for disability rights and am proud of the reporting I've done on them. 

But I reject this post by Mizrahi. It is racist. It is wrong. And it doesn't matter whether the racism was intentional or unintentional. It is ethically wrong. It is also factually wrong. The Obama Coalition (which proved just fine at electing presidents) depends on motivating large numbers of non-white voters to go to the polls. Yes, there are conservative well-off white voters who do not care about Trump's racism, hatred of Islam, terrible economic plans, lack of experience, history of predatory business practices, sexism, or other flaws...but do care about disability. They may be people who will shift to Clinton. Every vote counts.

But surely if Clinton wins, it will be because both Trump's hatemongering and Clinton's experience and policies motivate the whole Obama coalition - which is led by nonwhite voters - to turn out and even expand. A landslide would be a sign that moderate conservatives reject Trump. A victory will be people of color saving America from a would-be tyrant. To erase them is both wrong and biased.

I am sure that in the coming days, plenty of disabled people of color will be writing about this. As that happens, I will be sharing their work. I do not wish to speak for anyone but me, and be as clear as possible in my rejection of this kind of statement. I have also reached out to RespectAbility, formally, for comment. 

What's next?

RespectAbility has become important. It's connected to many of the movers and shakers in D.C., the corporate world, and the big non-profits. That's even moreso true now that it was named in a letter from the CEO of the Ford Foundation as a reason that they are going to be increasingly focused on disability justice. I have always had great interactions with Mizrahi and her team, which is why it's so important to me to write this post. I've tried to address some related concerns over email, but now it's time to respond to the public Facebook post with this comment of my own.

Our disability rights movement must address intersectional issues of justice - including race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and more - or it will fail. That intersectional frame needs to be built into the foundations of our organizations, our fundraising, our advocacy, our writing, and everything else we do. 

RespectAbility is going to have to prove itself, now. I wish them the best of luck. Start with listening to the people she has just erased. 

TSA and Disability: The Need for Intersectionality

Over the weekend and yesterday on the blog, I started collecting experiences with the TSA in the wake of the awful viral story from Memphis. It's a classic case of the #CultOfCompliance, and I expect to be writing more about this topic in due time. I hope, though, that as we advocate for change, we do so for ALL disabled individuals, and we focus on those most likely to be endangered by state use-of-force (including the TSA).

Which leads me to this Open Letter to the TSA Administrator from August, 2014, by Emily Munson, [EDIT: which she linked to in her more recent piece from July 1, 2016. I did not dig this up, but was led to it from her own recent writing].

Munson is a right-wing blogger for CDRNYS, tracking the election, but this is an older post [Edit: At CDR's request, I am noting this post was written for MDA, a different organization]. It argues against the searching of white, disabled, individuals by the TSA on the grounds that they are not terrorists. It explicitly supports racial profiling, instead.

I just want to say this:

• I oppose racial profiling. 
• I oppose the expansion of the surveillance state. 
• A call for disability rights that promotes racial profiling and expansion of surveillance is not my movement.

Vilissa Thompson's Black Disabled Woman Syllabus

Vilissa Thompson, over at Ramp Your Voice, has put together a "Black Disabled Woman Syllabus." It's a massive collection of links from various intersectional angles, a living document always ready to be expanded, and a fantastic resource. Thompson writes:

Over the past few weeks, I have been approached by individuals who wanted to understand the Black disabled experience, particularly the plight of Black disabled women and why our struggles matter. (The inquiries picked up when I published my“Lemonade” post last week.) I noticed a pattern from those who asked of my knowledge and personal reflections: many are ignorant of the experiences of Black Americans in general, Black women particularly, and when broken down further, Black disabled women specifically.

I decided that as someone who views herself as an “educator” within my advocacy scope, it would be fitting to create a compilation of books, essays/articles, speeches, music, and other bodies of work that accurately explains the diverse forms of Blackness that exists for Black women, and how the lives of Black disabled women meshed within that discourse.

I asked some of my incredible friends and fellow advocates for resource recommendations for this idea, and was provided a wealth of information that surpassed my hopes in establishing a “syllabus” of our intersectional experience.

Dive into the resources; read; share.

Thank you Vilissa for doing this.

The Wrong Approach on Media, Policing, and Disability

My home-away-from-home community of Minneapolis-St. Paul just learned that the police officers who killed Jamar Clark will not be charged. This case has become a focal point for Black Lives Matter in the Twin Cities.

There's another case though, that is getting both legislative and media attention: John Birkeland. He was killed during a mental health crisis when police came to check on him in February. Despite knowing he was in crisis (I'm told), police found he had a warrant for giving a false name once and decided to arrest him. He fled into the house, they broke open his door, sent in a dog, found him a closet, he came out and stabbed the dog, and they killed him. It's a tragic case and a classic "lawful but awful" example of how police mishandle mental health crises.

The problem is this piece by Minnesota Public Radio columnist Bob Collins. who positions this as "protest Birkeland, not Clark."

With so much activist and media attention focused on Jamar Clark, there’s been little energy left for the community to wonder why John Birkeland of Roseville had to die because he once gave a wrong name to police.

Birkeland, 57, was in the middle of a mental health crisis in February when Roseville police were asked to check on him and make sure he was OK. Assured by Birkeland that he was, police discovered that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest for giving a false name to police. So they broke down his door, sent a police dog in, and followed. Birkeland fled to a closet.

When the cops opened the closet door, he stabbed a police dog (the dog recovered), so nearly a half dozen police shot him dead.

There were no protests. No calls to see the police video, and almost no public consideration of how it might have gone differently.

Many police reform activists are suspicious that disability rights folks, especially white folks like me and Collins, are trying to use disability rights to derail the Black Lives Matter movement. This kind of framing only confirms that analysis, that to talk about mental health or disability is to diminish the need to talk about race. That's 100% wrong. They intersect and the specifics of the discrimination are not the same. The reasons black men are harassed and killed by police are not the same reasons that people with disabilities are more likely than abled people to encounter the police and for those encounters to go wrong. And yet, to understand the totality of the problems with American policing requires thinking about both racism AND ableism (AND classism AND heterosexism AND AND AND).

I've been explicit in the aspirational intersectionality of my project, but I see Collins' framing far too often from folks who want to talk about disability.

The most vulnerable are people who are multiply marginalized. Here's what I said in a recent interview that does a pretty good job of summarizing my approach:

Sarabia: Does what you're doing, putting it into a different context, does it minimize what so many people have been pointing out lately, that this is an attack on African-American civilians.

Me: It /is/ an attack on African-American civilians. And it plays into our long history of both individual and structural racism in American society. But one of the things that we've learned under the principles of intersectionality, is that when you are marginalized in multiple ways, you are multiply endangered.

So for example, many of these names of high profile victims of police violence - Kajieme Powell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray - these were all African-Americans and that's not a coincidence. It's an indictment of our, of the racism in American society. But all four of those people were also disabled ... and I don't think that's a coincidence either. So if we're really going to work on this, we need to look at these people as whole people, and think about the ways that racism and ableism intersect with each other and magnify each other.

Note: I was pleased to see a link to the recent Guardian coverage of the Ruderman report I co-authored at the bottom, as the whole point of that report was to conveniently provide journalists with a frame in which to place individual cases. I'd like Collins to re-read the discussions of intersectionality in the report, such as:

Taking an intersectional approach allows us to examine the roles of ableism—individual or structural discrimination against people with disabilities—in police use of force, without ignoring racism, classism, sexism, or other relevant issues.

We argue that disability intersects with other factors (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) to magnify degrees of marginalization and enhance risk of violence. When the media ignores or mishandles a major factor, as we contend they generally do with disability, it becomes harder to effect change. We also operate from a broad, cross-category, set of definitions for disability, inclusive of physical, developmental, intellectual, psychiatric, emotional, and any other form of disability that might fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

We need to find and make allies across categories, across movements.

Disability and Race: Testimony from Autistic Hoya

Great writing from Lydia Brown on healthcare disparities for disabled people of color.

From both personal and professional experience, I am keenly aware that healthcare disparities are one of the most insidious and pervasive forms of discrimination impacting any underrepresented or minoritized group. These disparities are evident in quality of care, diagnostic accuracy, network adequacy, service delivery models, multicultural competency, and overall health outcomes. These disparities result in lower life expectancy, less access to any healthcare including mental health services, and other deleterious effects on well-being and social stability.

Read the whole testimony here.

Here's a post on racial disparities in the Down syndrome community from Stephanie Holland.

Intersectionality: Including Disability In the Police Use-of-Force Discussion

Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope this document functions as a useful tool to help shift our perceptions.

One of our concerns, and something I think about daily as I've been writing on this beat for most of the last three years, was to make sure that our contribution added to the broader efforts to reform American policing, rather than offered a way to derail from critical ongoing conversations such as Campaign Zero and Black Lives Matter.

On Monday morning, Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) had me on their show "The Morning Shift" to talk about the white paper. Tony Sarabia, the host, gave me a chance to talk about our intersectional approach, asking:

Sarabia: Does what you're doing, putting it into a different context, does it minimize what so many people have been pointing out lately, that this is an attack on African-American civilians.

Me: It /is/ an attack on African-American civilians. And it plays into our long history of both individual and structural racism in American society. But one of the things that we've learned under the principles of intersectionality, is that when you are marginalized in multiple ways, you are multiply endangered.

So for example, many of these names of high profile victims of police violence - Kajieme Powell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray - these were all African-Americans and that's not a coincidence. It's an indictment of our, of the racism in American society. But all four of those people were also disabled ... and I don't think that's a coincidence either. So if we're really going to work on this, we need to look at these people as whole people, and think about the ways that racism and ableism intersect with each other and magnify each other. 

We wrote something similar in the White Paper:

Taking an intersectional approach allows us to examine the roles of ableism—individual or structural discrimination against people with disabilities—in police use of force, without ignoring racism, classism, sexism, or other relevant issues.

We argue that disability intersects with other factors (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) to magnify degrees of marginalization and enhance risk of violence. When the media ignores or mishandles a major factor, as we contend they generally do with disability, it becomes harder to effect change. We also operate from a broad, cross-category, set of definitions for disability, inclusive of physical, developmental, intellectual, psychiatric, emotional, and any other form of disability that might fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Intersectionality is tricky. It's not a magic word that cures all forms of unconscious bias. It remains my aspiration, however, in every word I write about social justice and civil rights.

Multiple Marginalization - Bullying of Disabled LGBT+ people.

Shared by many of my friends, this is a sad, but important, articulation of the ways that oppressive forces intersect in individuals who have more than one marginalized identity.

While over half of children who identify as LGBT have experienced homophobic, biphobic or transphobic bullying, this drastically increases among disabled LGBT people.
A survey found that two thirds (66%) of children with disabilities or SEN had experienced homophobic bullying, compared to 55% of the general population.
Concerns were also raised about the lack of sex and relationship education – which does not adequately address LGBT issues, nor sex and disability.
One student observed: “Sex education for disabled young people… There is none.”
Lauren Seager-Smith, National Coordinator of the Anti-Bullying Alliance said: “We are very concerned by reports of dual discrimination, bullying and marginalisation experienced by disabled young people that identify as LGBT+.

As I often say, this is the real lesson of intersectionality. Intersectionality has become a way to celebrate multiple aspects of our identity, which is lovely, but the term was constructed in order to reveal how black women struggled with both racism and sexism. Hence, intersectional feminism couldn't just fight against the latter.

The disabled community is filled with discrimination and silencing of its LGBT+ members. The LGBT+ community is filled with discrimination and silencing of its disabled members. Society as a whole considers disabled people asexual (or deviant).

To paraphrase the oft- and aptly-quoted Flavia Dzodan, our movements must be intersectional or they will be bullshit. Alas, intersectionality is hard. It's not how our brains are trained.

#SOTU4PWD - The Fight for Economic Justice is the Fight for Disability Rights

Basic principle: The fight for basic economic justice for everyone is the fight for better lives for people with disabilities. #SOTU4PWD
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 21, 2015

Yesterday President Obama mentioned "Americans with mental illness or physical disability" as part of his long list of inclusive terms. This is not my preferred language. It excludes my son, who has neither a mental illness nor a physical disability (he has an intellectual disability). It excludes a lot of people, and moreover separates people into categories in ways I find unhelpful. Still, it's good to see some entry disability in inclusive language in such a high profile address.

On Twitter, #SOTU4PWD (State of the Union for People With Disabilities) contains an ongoing discussion of that clause and what it might mean.

Here's my contribution, or at least some opening thoughts. Comments always welcome.

We are in an era of intensifying income inequality matched with political movements that want to shred safety nets and basic supports. Fights against those political movements and in favor of greater equality are, it turns out, fights for better lives for people with disabilities.

It's vital to keep this in mind, because in the U.S., the GOP plan is to divide and conquer. They play off the disabled vs the poor, the poor vs the elderly, the chronically disabled vs those hurt on the job, people with Down syndrome vs people with Schizophrenia, and more. If your political philosophy despises concepts like universal healthcare, social security, and basic income guarantees - and the GOP despises these - divide and conquer is the politically viable way to fight otherwise popular program.

So they have pitted Medicare vs the Affordable Care Act. Social Security for the elderly vs for the disabled. People with disabilities diagnosed under age 26 vs people with disabilities diagnosed after 26. The alleged "fakers" on SSDI vs the worthy disabled. The working poor vs the not working poor.

We fight back by refusing to be divided. Good policy is good policy and should be available to all. The fight for economic justice is the fight for disability rights.

At the same time, we have to advocate for our specific causes and specific needs, lest be rendered invisible. We need the president to nod to disability in his speech, if he's going to list problems. We need to demand that he say, as he did, "transgender," the first time that word appeared in a State of the Union.We need to make #BlackLivesMatter, rather then letting it fall into the softer, meaningless, all lives matter (because all lives do matter, but black lives are specifically treated as disposable). We need to be specific.

The way to be both specific and universal is called intersectionality. I write about it a lot - on abortion, on police violence, on mass killings, and so forth. It's a frame of mind, a mode of argument, and an analytical tool that pushes you to both see the specific issue at hand, not derail it, but link it to other kinds of issues.

In fact, intersectionality demands that we make these kinds of links, emerging from black feminist

arguments that we had to focus on race AND gender. Disability AND poverty. Poverty AND race. Etc.

Intersectional disability studies enables the focus on specific needs and reforms that people with disabilities require, but also keeps us from demanding that our issue, whatever it is, is explicitly on the table all the time. When people are marching because black lives do matter, people in the disability community don't have to say - why aren't you marching for us? Instead, we rally together, because your fight is our fight.

Your fight is our fight.

The fight for economic justice, in whatever form it takes, is the fight for disability rights. And the fight for disability rights, in whatever form it takes, should matter equally to those outside the community, working for economic justice.

Intersectionality - A look back at Crenshaw's article from 1989

From Wikipedia:

Intersectionality (or intersectionalism) is the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. An example is black feminism, which argues that the experience of being a black female cannot be understood in terms of being black, and of being female, considered independently, but must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other.[1]

This feminist sociological theory was first named by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, though the concept can be traced back to the 19th century.[2][3] The theory suggests that—and seeks to examine how—various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, caste, and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic injustice and social inequality. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society, such as racism, sexism, biphobia, homophobia, transphobia, and belief-based bigotry, do not act independently of one another. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.[4]

Yesterday I published a piece on CNN calling for an intersectional response to Eric Garner's death. Today I'd like to direct your attention to Crenshaw's article - which you can read here.

There's been LOTS of work on intersectionality since - indeed, one can argue that third wave feminism is fundamentally intersectional (or at least wants to be), but I hadn't read this piece in years, and spent my morning cup of tea with it again.

To me, intersectionality is the answer to so many discursive problems. It can keep us out of the oppression olympics (in which different groups try to claim THEIR problem is worse than YOUR problem). It allows us to link the seemingly disparate the identify new patterns of inequality and discrimination. It's a pathway to be an ally.

What it doesn't say is that all categories in an intersection are equally important to any given discussion. In my piece yesterday, I argued that disability, class, and fat-hatred intersect with the racism at play, rather than one excusing the other (as defenders of the police seem to think). I imagine the intersection visually (in 3D, with spinning whirling parts), with race at the center. It's a way of including categories, not erasing.

Here's how Crenshaw describes it, metaphorically, at two points in her article that I especially like (there's lots of pragmatic too. Read the article!):

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(11) This apparent contradiction is but another manifestation of the conceptual limitations of the single-issue analyses that inter­sectionality challenges. The point is that Black women can experi­ence discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradic­tion arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an inter­ section, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

Later, we get the basement:

(13-14)  Put dif­ferently, the paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of the most privileged Blacks. Notions of what constitutes race and sex discrimination are, as a result, narrowly tailored to embrace only a small set of circum­ stances, none of which include discrimination against Black women.

To the extent that this general description is accurate, the fol­lowing analogy can be useful in describing how Black women are marginalized in the interface between antidiscrimination law and race and gender hierarchies: Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sex­ual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-·feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way re­ side. In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that "but for" the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room. A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who-due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below-are in the position to crawl through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch.

As this analogy translates for Black women, the problem is that they can receive protection only to the extent that their ex­periences are recognizably similar to those whose experiences tend to be reflected in antidiscrimination doctrine. If Black women can­ not conclusively say that "but for" their race or "but for" their gender they would be treated differently, they are not invited to climb through the hatch but told to wait in the unprotected mar­gin until they can be absorbed into the broader, protected catego­ries of race and sex.

So that's what I've read this morning. Happy Friday.